Small Grief's Along the Way (Part 3)

Part 3: Sureness to our Planning 
I recently read a book by Luci Shaw, a poet and former professor at Regent College. She published a book that was a collection of journal entries she made during her husband’s cancer journey, and her subsequently becoming a widow (God in the Dark, 1989). In it, I came across a line that resonated with my own experience, and that gave words to a reality Kim and I lived with for a long time in my own health struggles, but which was intensified in the five years of her cancer struggle. The line she writes is near the end of the book, after her husband has passed and she is planning to move. The line is innocent enough, but spoke to something so important in life; Shaw wrote, “There is finally a sense of sureness to our planning” (253).
 
There is no good time for cancer to strike, but for Kim and I, it felt like it hit at an especially cruel time.
 
Kim and I had a very...unique...thirteen years of marriage. It was a time of constant transition, a marriage in which we always seemed to be dealing with some unknown thing in our life, a lack of sureness in our planning. Within three months of getting married I began the medical work up for a double lung transplant. Six months after our wedding day I was waitlisted for said transplant. I spent the next year-and-a-half on the waitlist, knowing that the call for my life saving transplant could come in 10 seconds, or it may never come at all. When the transplant did come in June 2010, we spent an amazing year watching my body recover, gaining a new strength I hadn’t had in years. Following my recovery, we decided that we wanted to start a family, and thus beginning a two-year fertility journey, ending each time with hope turning to heartbreak.
 
This brought us to 2014, six years into marriage. I was heavy into my master’s degree and Kim was thinking about her own career. It was a transitional time again as we grappled with the reality that we would not be having children, but it was also a time of incredible peace as we came to terms with this new vision for our life.
 
In 2015 we were finally falling into something of a regular rhythm of life. We felt, maybe for the first time in our marriage that there was “finally a sense of sureness to our planning.” We had made peace with our decision to end our fertility journey, my health was stable, and Kim had come to really enjoy her place of work, the role she had there, and her colleagues. She was happy with where life had led her. I was on a sure path to finishing my Masters of Divinity in spring 2016, a year of ordination schooling following that, with a call to the ministry being the next step. We felt we could finally look ahead. “Sureness to our planning.”
 
It was then that cancer came into our life, and all plans, any sense of sureness of what we thought life might look was thrown out the window. The day-dreaming and sureness evaporated in a single diagnosis.
 
Every plan, every dream now came with an asterisk; that asterisk being, "if Kim feels well enough, if she don’t have chemo that day, if the side effects aren’t bad, if the cancer hasn’t come back, if...if...if." There was a cloud hanging over every dream about the future, every plan made for a month or year ahead, even for next week, or in some cases, plans made for tomorrow, or even, that very afternoon. All sense of sureness was thrown out the window. How Kim felt could often change in a matter of minutes.
 
The TV show, Ted Lasso, popularized an old English saying, “it’s the hope that kills you.” Meaning that when we hope for something, when we look to the future, when we make plans, we open ourselves up to the hurt and disappointment of those plans not succeeding or coming to fruition. It is the same idea that whenever we open ourselves up to love, we open ourselves up to hurt and grief. Refusing to hope, to look to the future or make plans for fear of the hurt that could be caused by them not turning out is a very common thing for people who have experienced trauma. To shut down or to live in fear of things not going well is easy protection. Hope can kill our spirit. But a different phrase from the same episode of Ted Lasso, which is often forgotten, is one that I think is healthier and truer, “it’s the lack of hope that kills.”
 
Kim and I took a very pragmatic view of her cancer diagnosis and the road we knew she was on. From the very beginning in June 2016, after her first appointment with the oncologist and subsequent PET Scan, we knew she was in for a difficult chronic fight. This was something that was most likely not going to just disappear, and if she did go into remission, most likely the cancer would not stay that way forever.  A sureness to future plans was suspended, and we knew it would be suspended and asterisked, most likely, forever. And so, we grieved that. We grieved that the hope we had for the future, plans we made for camping, or for warm weather winter holidays, or continued work or seeing nieces and nephews grow up, always had to be balanced with the very real unknown.
 
After her chemo treatment ended at the end of 2016, and her subsequent scan in early 2017 showed no cancer, people wanted to celebrate that her cancer was gone. We went along with it, but we had lost the ability to have a sense of sureness to our celebrating. We had hope, and we never lost hope, but we couldn’t celebrate with true gladness. Our philosophy was never to lose our sense of hope and planning for the future, but to remain realistic that nothing was sure. To not allow our highs to get too high, and thus our lows to get too low.  
 
The word, “cancer,” has what I would say is a very long “follow-through.” I think even for people whose diagnosis isn’t as serious as Kim’s, the word and diagnosis of cancer casts a long shadow over life. Ever after the “all clear” from cancer, I have talked to people who still years later still live under the shadow, the fear of each yearly scan or bloodwork.
 
Nothing in life is certain. I am sure everyone who reads this can point to many examples in their own life of the sense of sureness in their planning that did not come to fruition, and that potentially left them crushed or disorientated in life. For Kim and I, we had come to learn to live in this unknown because of my health struggles, but her cancer diagnosis, and the intensity to her treatment brought that into much more focus. It was something we experienced as a grief, a frustration, but we never really articulated it, as most don’t. It was a just frustrating reality we had to live into.
 
If there is one through-line that these last three blog posts have pointed to, it maybe has to do with an overall loss of safety, or better put, of control in our life. In order to flourish in life, to grow and live a good life, we need a sense of control, a home base, a sense of agency to life. We have to have some notion of self-confidence and safety (that we are ok), and sense of hope, that we can imagine some sort of peace and control in our future. Without that sense of control or agency, life becomes shaky, unfocused, unstable. It is exhausting always to be feeling under threat.
 
Those five years, and especially the final couple months of Kim’s life were difficult, exhausting and stressful. But they were also years when much fun was had. There were still so many laughs and good moments. Many successes, much peace, much love, and a lot of hope still existed. As part of my own journey, I need to lay out the difficulty and losses of Kim’s cancer journey, to get it out, process it, and in doing that, maybe come alongside other’s in their own life journey. But in laying out the dark times, please don’t get the wrong impression. Life was still beautiful, and even in Kim’s final weeks, there were still windows of beauty, peace and still much hope for a final and eternal future.
I look forward to continue sharing more about this balance between the difficulties, griefs and losses we experienced, and the will and struggle to regain agency, hope and sureness throughout it all.
 
If you are reading these blog posts as they come out, I will away from my keyboard for a little while. I hope to post again in two weeks time.
​Thanks for reading!